Background
On environmental monitoring in the Baltic Sea and DNA-methods
Environmental monitoring
Monitoring biodiversity changes is critical to understand how ecosystems respond to disturbance. This is dependent on effective methods to assess biodiversity and ecological status of ecosystems. Such methods are particularly valuable for habitats under severe pressure like the Baltic Sea soft-sediments. Monitoring programs for benthic ecosystems focus on macrofauna, animals larger than 1 mm, for the evaluation of ecosystem health. In the Baltic Sea where there are very few macrofauna species this type of monitoring could run into problems of distinguishing between impact levels. The inclusion of smaller organisms could enable a more fine-grained analysis and possibly reduce monitoring costs.
Meiofauna and nematodes
Nematodes are the most abundant and diverse group on the seafloor, and is almost exclusively in the meiofauna size range, and their ubiquity would lend them well for inclusion in monitoring programs. However, for smaller organisms such as nematodes, traditional methods of determining species visually are very time consuming and requires detailed species knowledge.
DNA-methods and metabarcoding
Newer techniques such as metabarcoding, a DNA-method that identifies a species based on is "barcode" (A barcode is a segment of DNA from an organism that enables its identification), could however make their inclusion feasible. This project tries to develop and enable the application of these methods to nematodes in the Baltic Sea, both for monitoring of the Baltic in particular, and for application in other regions.